carbon

An opinionated online text editor, self-hosted & Git-powered.

Like a carbon paper, through this app you can edit your text files in a single, flat directory on your server.

Aims to be alternative to Google Keep, Simplenote, Evernote, and so on.

demo site (Without the git feature; reset every 15 minutes)

features

• No collaborative editing – it's designed for individual use.
• No fancy editing feature such as WYSIWYG or image rendering.
• No tags, categories, or subdirectories to keep things straightforward.
• Pressing Ctrl + Enter on the textarea will save the change.
  • Optionally, the change can be automatically added and commited to the Git repository.
• Keeps scroll position (roughly) between view mode and edit mode.
• Texts with .md extension are converted to html in the view mode.
• KaTeX supported.
• Search powered by fd-find and ripgrep (regex pattern supported).

deploy

Here, assume that you store text files in /path/to/data.

1. If you'd like to use the git feature, git init && git add -A && git commit -m "Initial commit" in data. After that, add user.name and user.email to data/.git/config like this:

[user]
    name = Kyohei Uto
    email = "im@kyoheiu.dev"

If you do not want the git feature, skip this step and go on to the next (and final) one.

2. Use docker compose up -d with docker-compose.yml. For example:

version: '3'
services:
  carbon:
    image: docker.io/kyoheiudev/carbon:1.0.1
    container_name: carbon
    volumes:
      - '/path/to/data:/carbon-client/data:rw'
    # If you do not want the git feature, omit this!
    environment:
      - CARBON_GIT_SERVER=carbon-git
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    logging:
      driver: json-file
      options:
        max-size: 1m
        max-file: '3'
  # If you don't want the git feature, omit `carbon-git` entirely!
  carbon-git:
    image: docker.io/kyoheiudev/carbon-git:1.0.0
    container_name: carbon-git
    # UID and GID that created Git repository.
    user: '1000:1000'
    volumes:
      - './data:/carbon-git/data:rw'
      - '/etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro'
      - '/etc/group:/etc/group:ro'
    environment:
      # default to 'carbon'
      - CARBON_GIT_USER="carbon"
      # default to 'git@example.com'
      - CARBON_GIT_EMAIL="git@example.com"
    logging:
      driver: json-file
      options:
        max-size: 1m
        max-file: '3'

And the app will start listening on port 3000.

images

• carbon is the app itself, offering everything except the git feature.
• carbon-git only serves the git feature.

tech stack

• frontend
  • SvelteKit
  • tailwind
• server to support git
  • Rust(axum)
  • libgit2

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome!

If you have an idea for a new feature, please create an issue before making PR.

Development

Prerequisites

• nodejs for client-side
• cargo to enable the git feature

git clone https://github.com/kyoheiu/carbon
npm install
CARBON_GIT_SERVER=localhost npm run dev # launch carbon, enabling git server by the env
make git # launch the git server
make fmt # format both side

For details, see Makefile.